Delta Blues

Now we’ll head south way south into Mississippi’s storied delta region. land of cotton land of catfish land of the blues. Like country and western music, the Mississippi delta blues is a distinctly American music born out of the hearts and hardships of farmers.
The songs that have been around for generations are still being sung, and new ones are still being written.  They can be heard on many a front porch and juke joints deep in blues country.

It’s a sultry summer night in Jackson, Mississippi. After the sun has set, singer Jackie Bell is heating things up inside the 930 Blues Café. Like most nights, it’s standing room only at one of Mississippi’s hottest spots for live blues music. Of course, in these parts, “blues” isn’t just a musical style…it’s a way of life. 

For generations this fertile soil has produced cotton by the truckload. But the rich soil didn’t make everyone in these parts wealthy. Out of this region’s extreme poverty grew something else: blues music. About 30 miles from Jackson in the tiny town of Bentonia is Jimmy “Duck” Holmes’ and his Blue Front Café. He looks back on the past, “Well it was labeled a juke joint years ago. My parents got it back in 1948 and they ran it ‘til the early 70s, then I came on board. My mother sort of like kind of mentored me through it and then she cut it loose completely.”

Bentonia sits just on the edge of Mississippi’s delta region a swath of land that stretches along the Mississippi River in the western part of the state. The origins of “Delta Blues” can be traced to juke joints around Mississippi. Small gathering places for dancing, drinking, and just relaxing after a hard days work.  Jimmy says, “See when I was a kid, this uh, June, probably we would still be in the fields chopping cotton all day long, as hot as it is right now, trying to get finished before the fourth of July. In the hot sun. hot sun. Right now, we’d chop until the sun goes down.”

The most famous blues musician from these parts is B.B. King. Here in Bentonia they have their own brand of blues. Jimmy points to some famous faces in the blues world, “That’s Jack Owens. He’s one of the ones that carried the music style to the world. Matter of fact, he carried it to the world.  Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Bobby Rush. Those guys was well known professionals.”

Many of the juke joints that thrived 80 years ago are gone. The blues scene in these parts isn’t what it used to be, but there are still people working hard to keep it alive. In the town of Leland, visitors can find out about Delta Blues past and present at the Highway 61 Blues Museum. Not far away a mural honoring delta blues musicians.

One of them: local farmer Harry “Bub” Branton. He remembers how he started, “The first guitar I ever saw was in my dad’s shop. I had, a tractor driver, a black guy, showed me some blues and a white guy showed me some Chuck Berry. So that was my first taste of it.”  Branton breaks into song, “Mama bought a chicken, thought it was a duck, put it on the table with the legs stickin’ up…you’ve got to bottle it up and go.”

Branton works a farm in this region, “We’re growing about 1000 acres of corn this year, 1000 acres of cotton and they’re balancing with soybeans. We also have 600 acres of catfish.

Branton looks back on his upbringing, “When I was growing up, it was still a plantation and they had mules and picked cotton by hand And the laborers singing the you know, in the field how they worked, and it was really interesting. Agriculture was tough, you know, back 50 years ago…I think that’s where, you know, the blues were born out of. It was really rural hand labor agriculture of that era, that probably died around 1955 or so, you know when mechanization went in. “

With the exception of Harry Branton, there are very few blues musicians farming these days. But Branton says the stories of hard work and heartache that grew out of the rich Mississippi soil are still a part of today’s blues scene, “Well it’s so expressive, uh and I think it’s easier to relate to the emotions that are being expressed though that music, because it’s not intellectual music at all. It’s not a head trip. It’s a you know, it’s a gut trip and a heart trip.”

Back in Bentonia, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes isn’t getting rich playing the blues, but he doesn’t mind, “It’s nothing but a storyteller with an instrument, Most blues singers tell it where they feel it from the heart. And what makes that so, if you, I mean, if you had a bad night or a bad week or a bad year and want to tell somebody about it, what’s wrong with that?”

Jimmy welcomes blues fans from around the globe. Heck, he might even pick up the guitar. He has just one request sign the wall!